March 4, 2004
«Swarm» Text Messaging
Seattlepi.com reports on the projects presented at the Microsoft Research TechFest, an annual event now in its fourth year on the company's Redmond campus where 400 researchers from Microsoft Research labs in Beijing, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Redmond and Cambridge, England, show their work at a two-day event.
This one caught my eye as the terminology is entireley borrowed from Howard Rheingold's «Smart Mobs».
"Another project being shown at the event is called Swarm, a program that lets people easily send a text message to a preset group of friends and associates. Researchers envision uses including the coordination of so-called smart mobs, in which large numbers of people gather spontaneously.
Microsoft researcher Shelly Farnham, who is working on the project, has been testing it among a group of her friends, who use it in part to communicate about parties they're attending or planning to attend.
"It's been really interesting to see how completely addicted they've gotten to it in a short amount of time," she said. They've even started using the project name as a verb -- as in, "I'll swarm you later."
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